In Argentina’s legislative elections on October 26, where voting was mandatory, only 68% of the electorate cast their ballots. Sixty-eight percent — the exact same rate as Cuba’s legislative elections in November 2022. In other words, a democratic election in Argentina drew the same turnout as one held under a dictatorship in Cuba. That should provoke reflection on the state of democracy — and it does. The problem is that the reflection always leads to the same easy conclusions, which fail to spark real debate because they merely reaffirm what everyone already believes.
What lies behind such low participation? Months before the vote, after seven consecutive elections with poor turnout, journalist Claudio Jacquelin identified three possible explanations: the lack of appeal of legislative elections and candidates, public discontent with politics, and the country’s dire economic situation.
But what does “lack of appeal” mean? Are elections supposed to be attractive? Isn’t choosing the people’s representatives attractive enough? Or do we now expect democratic participation to be as entertaining as a concert by our favorite band?
The claim of “discontent with politics” is even more striking. Democracy exists precisely so that citizens can remove those who generate discontent. What logic justifies abstaining from voting because one is dissatisfied with those in power? It’s like installing a burglar alarm, and when thieves break in, turning it off because the noise is annoying.
Moreover, if the goal is to express discontent through the vote, wouldn’t a blank or null ballot be more meaningful? Abstention can easily be read as apathy or laziness, whereas blank or null votes demonstrate a deliberate choice: a citizen made the effort to go to the polls but found no suitable candidate. That was exactly the strategy used by Algerian progressive leader Zoubida Assoul, who promoted blank voting in protest against Algeria’s “procedural elections” in 2024.
Abstention can indeed be a valid form of protest, but only when the system offers no democratic alternative, as in Cuba. During the 2022 elections, the Cuban opposition explicitly encouraged abstention as a form of rejection. “We hope for a high level of abstention to say no to the dictatorship,” said activist Carolina Barreiro. Abstention, in this sense, is a message directed against an illegitimate regime, not against democratic candidates.
This is not unique to Latin America. In Algeria, voter participation fell from 74% in 2009 to 40% in 2019. Globally, the average voter turnout in 2024 stood at 62%, ten points lower than in 2004. Earlier this year, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni even urged citizens to abstain from a referendum — and she succeeded: only 30% of eligible voters participated, well below the 50% + 1 threshold required for validity. Instead of campaigning for a “no” vote, Meloni campaigned for no vote. As union leader Maurizio Landini admitted, the high abstention clearly revealed Italy’s democratic crisis.
To move beyond these simplistic explanations, we must accept that democracy may not be what we thought it was — at least not as we understand it today. Literally, democracy means “power of the people.” Nothing more. It doesn’t imply that the people’s power is inalienable or permanent. Power, if not exercised, ceases to exist. When people stop exercising their power, they renounce it — and without the people’s power, there is no democracy.
Does this create a power vacuum? Does democracy give way to anarchy? Certainly not. Someone will inevitably occupy the power that the people abandon. We may not know who it will be or what they will do with it, but one thing is certain: it will not be democracy.
We have various terms for non-democratic systems — dictatorship, autocracy, authoritarianism. They all share a comforting connotation: they absolve the people of responsibility by blaming a single tyrant who “seizes” power. Yet this is a distortion. When citizens willingly relinquish their political power, the regime that emerges has a very different name — one coined by the 16th-century French philosopher Étienne de La Boétie: voluntary servitude.
*Machine translation, proofread by Ricardo Aceves.
Autor
Politologist and Doctor in Political Science from the University of Salamanca. He specializes in the succession of power and vice-presidency in Latin America.
